Questions Asked Out Loud

Bergman took a one act play he had written for drama students and turned it into the most quoted religious argument in cinema. A knight returns from the crusades to a Sweden emptied by plague, meets Death on a beach and proposes chess, not to win but to delay long enough to do one meaningful thing. Around that runs a travelling company of players, a blacksmith, a mute girl, a self flagellating procession and a witch burning, and the film moves between them without settling into allegory. What keeps it alive is that Bergman gives the atheist, the believer and the indifferent equal weight and refuses to referee. The images, photographed by Gunnar Fischer in hard Nordic light, are so strong that they have become shorthand for cinema itself.